The Dormition of the Theotokos

Blessed Feast to you! My husband and I married before we converted to the Orthodox Faith, and our wedding anniversary falls during Dormition fast, on August 9th. This year we are celebrating 7 years of marriage. On our fourth anniversary, my grandfather departed this life, so on that day we also remember him--Memory Eternal!  It happens that I was born on my grandparent's wedding anniversary, which I think forms an interesting circle. This morning during Divine Liturgy, I was struck by the Troparion of the Feast and how it similarly juxtaposes birth and death.

To non-Christians, and perhaps even to those Christians who do not celebrate the lives of the saints, it may seem odd that we would celebrate the departure from life of the Mother of God as a Great Feast. It may seem backward or callous that we celebrate someone on the day of their "death."  In secular life we celebrate birthdays, even for people we are remembering.  We honor the Presidents in February because two of our great Presidents, Washington and Lincoln had birthdays in this month. We honor Martin Luther King Jr. in January for his birthday, rather than in April when he was assassinated.  And we do celebrate births in the church, most notably of course, the birth of Christ, but also that of the Theotokos and St. John the Forerunner. In fact, we even commemorate the conception of these Saints. However, for most saints, the date of their repose is the primary date on which the they are honored.

When we celebrate the Saints' lives on the date when they departed from this life, we are celebrating their whole lives, here on Earth, and the Heavenly lives to which they depart. The Feast of the Dormition illustrates for us why this is so. When we refer to the Theotokos as the Mother of Life, as we do in the Troparion of the Feast, we refer to the fact that she gave birth to the One who is Life, and who conquered death.  The name of the Feast is another clue about why we celebrate the date that Saints depart from this life.  The word Dormition means "falling asleep."  When we refer to Christians as falling asleep or as departing this life, and to death as repose, we are not speaking euphemistically. We are not trying to soften death for the living or to avoid thinking of death.  We take this language from the Bible, and by speaking this way we are affirming that those who die in Christ do not die.

Like the Theotokos, when we depart this life, we do not forsake the world.  When Christians repose, we enter into the eternal Life of the Kingdom of Heaven, that same Life that we participate in during the Divine Liturgy. So while it is difficult and painful when our friends and family depart this life, at the same time we celebrate Christ's victory over death, knowing that because He is risen, so are our loved ones.  While they depart this life, they do not forsake us, and we ever ask them to intercede for us. Most Holy Theotokos, save us!

Christ is Risen! Χριστός ἀνέστη! !المسيح قام

I hope everyone has had a joyous Feast of Feasts. I had not intended for my spring break post to indicate that I was going to take a break from blogging for the rest of the fast, but I guess it served as such. Today I have caught up on all my blog reading. I really enjoyed looking at the many pictures of Holy Week and Paschal celebrations, but I don't have any to share myself, just a few photos around the house.

The last few weeks have been very full.  Efforts are being made locally to form an Orthodox school, and I had the opportunity to meet with one of the leaders of the steering committee about serving on the school board which is being formed. We had our annual staff appreciation dinner at the library where I work. The weekend of the fifth Sunday of Lent, we had a wonderful Lenten retreat at our church which is hosted jointly by the women of our parish as well as those of the local Greek parish.  This year Maria Khoury came and spoke to us of her experiences raising a family in the Holy Land, which was very inspiring. On the 25th of March after Holy Liturgy for the Annunciation, there was a fish dinner at church celebrating not only the feast, but also the 50th birthday of our parish priest. And of course, through it all there have been the Lenten church services.

And then, Holy Week: my favorite week of the year. I was telling a non-Orthodox co-worker about the services of Holy Week, and she commented, "It sounds like you could just pitch a tent in the church parking lot for the week." I believe that most of my readers are Orthodox Christians, but for any that are not, or for those curious about the schedule we follow in our Antiochian parish, here is the schedule for Holy Week this year. It gives a brief description of the various services.  Each one is unique and beautiful and a blessing to attend.

I find Bright Week a bit of a shock to the system, in more ways than one. Staying up most of the night on Pascha, eating all of the rich, (delicious!) festal foods, and then after being so immersed in the life of the Church for Lent and Holy Week, suddenly finding myself back to life as usual.  I take the day off of work on Bright Monday to ease myself back into it, but the big shift in the pattern of daily life tends to feel very abrupt to me. I do find it helps if I have some fun things and projects planned to fill the time I was spending in church: there is a garden to be planted, things to make, and books to read. Not to mention chores to be done, which have been severely neglected! I'm so impressed with those of you who do a Lenten spring clean. For this working wife Lent means work, church, sleep, repeat.  Food and food shopping find their way into that pattern sometimes, but cleaning, almost never. So I have plenty to do to help me adjust to the seasonal shift, and hopefully I'll be inspired to share a few of these projects here.

Blessed Paschal season to you all!

Spring Break

James was on Spring Break last week, so we took a little weekend trip to a popular spring break destination. The weather was beautiful.  We frolicked on the beach, enjoyed some fine dining, saw the sights, and did a little celebrity watching.

Oh, wait, actually we went to Fort Wayne, Indiana. Weather? It rained the whole weekend.  But at least it didn't snow!  Beach? We didn't even think to bring swimsuits to take advantage of the hotel pool. Fine dining? We had Chinese food, which is kind of a treat for us, anyway. We also went to Burger King. Did you know they have veggie burgers?  I hadn't been there in years, and I had forgotten. Burger King was one of the highlights of our trip, actually, since we got to spend a leisurely lunch talking with Emily and Ben while their kids played in the playground.  So Burger King gets five stars from me.

And sights? Yes, there were certainly sights to see.  We got to attend the Opening of the Doors for St. John Chrysostom's beautiful new building, as well as the first Divine Liturgy celebrated in their temple. Celebrities?  His Grace Bishop MARK was presiding. Through a confluence of events the year we were Chrismated, James and I saw His Grace in so many different cities, that he joked upon seeing us after the fourth or fifth place, "Here come my groupies."

OK, so not a beach vacation at a popular spring break destination, but a still a lovely little spring break. The Opening of the Doors was joyous. It was wonderful to attend during Lent, since I can't help but anticipate hearing the same dialog from Psalm 24 on Pascha and thus being reminded of Our Lord breaking the gates of Hades and His victory over death.

You can read about the Opening of the Doors and see more of the sights at Emily's blog.  And the first two pictures are from a trip that James and I took a couple of years ago to the San Francisco Bay area.

Two Visitors

As I mentioned in my last post, I spent the weekend of the 24th in southern Indiana. This gave me the chance to visit the very new, as yet unnamed, mission in Evansville. (Sorry, no pitures this time.) It was so wonderful to be able to go to Liturgy while there. This was a first for me. Although Evansville is the third largest city in Indiana, and if you include nearby Owensboro, KY it has a metropolitan area of easily 400,000 people, there is no Orthodox church of any jurisdiction in the area. I have long been praying for a mission to be started there, so it was a particular joy and blessing to attend Liturgy in my home town. Please pray for Father Daniel and the faithful there. They are a very small community right now, so I pray that this seed will bear much fruit in the years to come.

While I was in Evansville, being warmly welcomed by the founders of the mission, we had a visitor at my home parish in Indianapolis. This is not unusual, since we generally have at least a few visitors every week, be they family or friends of parishioners, people new to or visiting the area, or people curious about the Orthodox faith. But our visitor last week, Stacy Towle Morgan, has written about her visit to St. George at her blog, Never Enough Sundays where she is blogging about her experiences as she visits a different place of worship every week this year. In addition to writing about her visits, she is also taking the time to interview the spiritual leaders of the communities she visits, so you can hear her podcast where she has interviewed our pastor, the V. Rev. Father Nabil Hanna.

Morgan amusingly titles her post about her visit to St. George, "This Is Not a Church for Sissies: Discipline Required."" I can understand how she drew that conclusion, especially having visited an Orthodox Church as we prepare to enter Great Lent, but actually I think the Orthodox Church is absolutely for "sissies." Discipline is certainly something I find to be a constant struggle, and I know I'm not alone in that. The Church supports us in that struggle. It provides us with the loving support of a community of brothers and sisters engaged in the same struggle, spiritual fathers to guide us, and the nourishment of the Food we need to strengthen us.

I found it interesting to read about the Liturgy from the perspective of someone totally new the experience. I'm still quite young in the faith, having been Chrismated only three years ago, but although I was worshiping that same Sunday in a new place, with new people, in a very different environment than usual, the experience wasn't new to me at all. It was the Holy Liturgy that I've come to know and love, that I participate in each week. As I stood in Father Daniel's dining room, singing along with a choir just getting to know one another and the music, I felt totally at home.

Fast Food Friday

If you are an Orthodox Christian, you know that we are currently observing the Apostles' Fast, so I thought this would be a good time to begin a series of posts on meals for fasting. I especially want to focus on meals that are quick and/or very easy to make, and I thought it would be appropriate to post these on Fridays. Since I had been a vegetarian for years before I was Orthodox, I think the discipline of fasting was an easier thing for me to incorporate into my life than it is for many converts. Having an array of vegan foods already in my cooking repertoire made it fairly easy to settle on meals for these days, and I thought I'd share some of our favorites.

Since I'm a vegetarian, I don't eat fish or shellfish whether during a fast or not. During fasting periods, basically I eat a vegan diet. If you're not Orthodox, fasting typically refers to refraining from all meat, dairy, eggs, and usually fish, wine and olive oil (some consider these to mean all alcohol and oils). Shellfish is permitted. Actual observance is personal, depends on one's one spiritual journey, and should be undertaken with consultation from one's priest. Fasting is accompanied with prayer, almsgiving and confession. I freely admit that the spiritual aspects of fasting pose a greater challenge for me than the physical discipline, but if I'm slack on the physical discipline, of course that makes the spiritual discipline that much harder. Being unprepared, busy, tired, sick, etc., can be a obstacle to observing the fast, so having some easy fall-back recipes is really useful. If you are a recent convert, you may not have built a list of reliable stand-bys, and if you're not, it can be nice to add new ones to the rotation.

I've noticed that popcorn for dinner is a popular concept around blog land. Some serve it with cocoa, some serve it with wine. At our house, it's popcorn and smoothies. Sorry about the blurry picture. We were in a hurry to move on to some Harry Potter and Scrabble. Popcorn and smoothies is one of our go-to meals when the meal plan falls through, we don't feel like cooking, we run short of time, we've gotten back from evening church services during Lent, or we just want something kind of easy and fun.

For most of my life my mom made popcorn at 9 pm as a bedtime snack. I grew up eating popcorn made on the stove top, so I don't really like the microwave kind, and in fact, we don't currently have a microwave. Stove top popcorn is very easy to do. I pour enough canola oil into a sauce pan to give the bottom a good coat, then I cover the bottom of the pan with a single layer of popcorn kernels. I put the lid on the pan, leave it vented, and turn the heat to medium high. After a few minutes the popcorn will start to pop. When the rapid fire popping dies down, I pour it into bowls. We salt it, and I like to add nutritional yeast. Mom never buttered the 9 o'clock popcorn, so to me there isn't anything missing, but of course you could add margarine (hopefully a non-hydrogenated one) if you really wanted. Or you could go the other direction and make this a totally oil-free meal with an air-popper.

We don't really have a smoothie recipe. Basically we toss whatever frozen fruit we're in the mood for into the blender, add enough juice to cover the fruit, and blend. This time I think we had mango, pineapple and strawberries. We meant to blend that with orange juice, but we didn't realize we had run out, so we used grape. Not our favorite smoothie ever, but still tasty. This simple meal is surprisingly satisfying, and it's very easy to always keep the ingredients on hand. I have a feeling it would go over well with kids, too. Watch for actual recipes on upcoming Fast Food Fridays.